What are All These Front-end JS web technologies?

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Being a front-end web developer is not easy these days due to the wide variety of front-end technologies out there to learn about.  Here are just a few of them (in no particular order).

• Angular JS: provides a structured model-view pattern for your front-end web app
• CanJS: Another model-view Javascript framework.
• EmberJS: Yet another.  Here is an article comparing various MV Javascript frameworks.
• Respond.js: Make CSS3 media queries work for IE6-8.  A must if you need to support IE8 in responsive design.
• ResponseJS:  Not to be confused with respond.js, ResponseJS is a jQuery plugin that helps with responsive design.  Using HTML 5 data attributes, it can be use to serve high versus low fidelity images depending on min/max width of browser.  It has breakpoint sets. It can trigger events when DOM is ready and/or when window resizes.  Think of it as javascript that can detect min/max width of browser.
• Handlebars.js: templating engine compatible with mustache.
• Backbone.js:  Provides a backbone (structure) to your front-end web app using models, collections, and views.  Its only dependency is underscore.js.  Wordpress uses backbone.js and hence underscore.js
• Underscore.js: Set of javascript utililties.
• jQuery: Javascript library.  A much nicer way to write javascript.  Lots of stuff uses it — wordpress, drupal, expression engine, etc.
• Zepto.js: Like jQuery, but leaner and does not support any version of Internet Explorer.  Useful for mobile phones (which do not use Internet Explorer). But you better fall-back to jQuery for desktop views that are running IE.
• Sizzle.js: Javascript CSS selector engine.
• Node.js: Platform built on Chrome Javascript engine.

 

There are a lot more.

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